Читать книгу Calcio: A History of Italian Football - John Foot - Страница 65

Roma: ‘Look up to the skies. Only the sky is bigger than you.’ Lazio (reply): ‘You’re right. It’s blue and white.’ (Lazio’s colours)

(Fan banners, circa 2001)

Unlike Milan or Turin, Rome’s two clubs do not have huge followings outside of their city, or its immediate province. Lazio fans are seen as largely hailing from the province of Rome or the towns around the capital, whilst Roma fans are from the city itself. Unlike in Milan or Turin, being a fan in the capital is thus a territorial question. Certain zones in the city are Roma zones – Testaccio (where the Roma stadium once was), San Lorenzo, Garbatella. When Roma won their third championship in 2003, these areas were festooned with yellow-and-red flags, graffiti and murals, many of which can still be seen.

AS Roma was formed in 1927 after pressure from the Fascist Party led to the fusion of three Rome clubs into one (the three teams were L’Alba, La Roman and La Fortitudo). The only team that resisted the call was Lazio, who have a much longer history than their hated city rivals. This manoeuvre also led to a historic imbalance in the fan-bases of the two clubs. Roma have always had far more fans than Lazio. Neither club has ever really challenged the sustained dominance of the northern cities’ clubs. Despite their financial clout, star players and passionate following, Lazio and Roma have only won five championships between them. Lazio triumphed in the early 1970s and again in 2000. Roma won in 1943, 1983 and 2001.

Lazio became an important club, for the first time, in the 1930s – although they had challenged for early championships in 1913 and 1914. Star striker Silvio Piola arrived at the club in 1934 and helped the team towards a series of good finishes in that decade. Benito Mussolini, it is often said, was a Lazio fan but it is not clear whether the tendency of the club’s followers towards the politics of the extreme right began under the regime itself. After the war, Lazio veered between Serie A and Serie B, and only made a serious challenge for the scudetto in 1972–1974, when they won one championship and finished second and third. That crazy team – with its scandals, violence and madcap behaviour – broke up quickly amid recrimination (as top scorer Giorgio Chinaglia left for the US league) and tragedy (the deaths of the manager Tommaso Maestrelli from cancer and midfielder Luciano Re Cecconi in a ridiculous accident).

Disaster struck in 1980, with the club relegated following the involvement of a group of Lazio players in the worst betting scandal in Italian football history. A series of other scandals, relegations and promotions followed until 1992, when wheeler-dealer businessman Sergio Cragnotti took over. Through massive investment and financial trickery – Lazio were the first Italian club to be floated on the stock exchange – the new president built a team able to win a scudetto, with a host of foreign stars and manager Sven Goran Eriksson. Yet, this success was ephemeral. Cragnotti went bankrupt and was arrested on charges of fraud and false accounting. The team was forced to sell off most of its well-known players and teetered on the edge of collapse. Only creative accounting saved the club from ruin in 2005. Lazio’s fans, meanwhile, strengthened their reputation as the most racist and right-wing group of supporters in Serie A. Fascist symbols, slogans and even swastikas were a common sight amongst Lazio’s hard-core support, who revelled in their extreme reputation.

Roma’s first manager was legendary Englishman William Garbutt, who soon moved on to Napoli. For years (1929–1940) the club played in a local, neighbourhood stadium – at Testaccio – where the atmosphere was extremely intimidating. The strong team of the 1930s and 1940s – with Fulvio Bernardini at the heart of the side and the ‘eighth King of Rome’, Amedeo Amadei, up front – only won the wartime championship. For years rumours circulated about the role of the fascist government in that Rome triumph (especially after the refereeing of a hard-fought derby) but no real evidence of wrongdoing has ever emerged.⁹ Roma’s victory meant that, for the first time, the scudetto had gone to a team south of Bologna. After that 1942 victory the team languished in mid-table for much of the post-war period and even suffered the indignity of Serie B. Despite their financial power, a series of well-known players, famous managers and the new Olympic stadium, Roma never came close to the scudetto again until the late 1970s. Instead, the team specialized in winning the little-loved Italian Cup. This all changed as innovative manager Nils Liedholm built an exciting team around Italian stars Agostino Di Bartolomei, Bruno Conti and Roberto Pruzzo and the genius of Roberto Falção, the Brazilian playmaker. Roma were pipped to the championship by Juve in 1980 but they finally won a post-war title in 1983. The partying went on for days, complete with hit records by Roma fan and long-haired crooner Antonello Venditti. The titles of his songs were not over-imaginative: Grazie Roma being followed by Roma, Roma.

Roma came very close to winning the European Cup in 1984, only losing to Liverpool on penalties. They then threw the scudetto away (under Eriksson) in 1986. In the 1990s, a powerful new team was built around young genius Francesco Totti and Argentinian imports Gabriel Batistuta and Walter Samuel. Under Fabio Capello, Roma won their third championship in 2001, after being forced to watch Lazio triumph the year before. Yet, as with Lazio, the club’s eyes had been bigger than its stomach. President Franco Sensi struggled to pay his players’ wages and the club’s debts reached unheard-of levels. To get out of financial trouble – like Lazio – Sensi sold off a series of stars and, in 2004, Capello left. The brief challenge of the Rome clubs to the Milan-Turin hegemony appeared to be over – it was simply too expensive to keep up with the big three.

The Rome derby is perhaps the most passionate, talked-about and violent fixture in Italy. Many fans from both teams will say that they prefer to win that game than the scudetto, and some actually believe what they are saying. Victories and defeats have become the stuff of legend, and a good performance in a Rome derby can make a player’s career. Lazio fans celebrated for weeks after beating Roma away in 1932. Paolo Di Canio became a Lazio hero after a goal as a teenager in a 1989 derby, and Paul Gascoigne did the same with a late headed equalizer against Roma in 1993. When Di Canio returned to Lazio in 2004 (the fans had been asking presidents for years to ‘give us back Di Canio’) he was greeted by thousands of Laziali, on a sweltering August day, who cheered his every touch during training. Di Canio was given a microphone to talk to the fans. In tears, he finished off his ‘speech’ with a rousing rendition of chi non salta della Roma è (‘anyone does not jump is a Roma fan’) at which point the whole team, technical and management staff as well as all the fans, began to jump up and down. Di Canio’s first derby in his new spell with the club was preceded by a week of traded insults in the press with Roma’s most popular player, Francesco Totti. In the game itself, Di Canio scored a superb goal as Lazio won 3–1, and was then punished by a huge fine after he was photographed giving a fascist salute to his adoring fans.¹⁰

Rome derbies have often been marred by violence and racism. Whilst the hard-core Lazio fans – traditionally from the right and far right of the political spectrum – indulged in anti-Semitism and other forms of racism directed at the Roma ‘end’, Roma’s fans tended to be on the left. Some were on the far left in the 1970s, even comparing the Brazilian midfielder Falção with Chairman Mao, in part because the two words rhymed well. In the 1990s, this began to change. Both sets of fans moved to the right whilst continuing to fight each other inside and outside the stadium. There were occasions, however, when Lazio and Roma supporters allied against their common enemy – the police. All this culminated in the shocking events of March 2004, when the derby was suspended after false rumours began to spread amongst the fans that a young boy had been killed after clashes with the carabinieri outside the ground. It later appeared as if the whole event had been set up to allow fans to attack the police.

Nowhere in Italy was football as important as it was in Rome, with its numerous fan clubs, football-dedicated radio stations, interminable phone-ins and ultrà bars. This fanaticism could be seen most clearly after the two championship victories – for Lazio, and then for Roma – in 2000 and 2001. The celebrations paralysed Rome for days, and left traces all over the city and its hinterland – through murals, graffiti, flags and street parties.